Sandbox 01/2017

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For 2017, instead of constantly losing all the links that I encounter over time, I will list anything i encounter here with a small annotation to remind myself of it

Links, etc

Xenopus

Dear Friends,

Please join us in an extended moment of suspense: two weeks ago, X was artificially inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor and she may be pregnant. This morning a small group of academics, artists, journalists and frog enthusiasts convened in Brooklyn to stage a historical reenactment of a pregnancy test that was developed in the 1930s. We injected one cubic centimeter of X’s urine into a pet adult female Xenopus laevis frog named Loretta. If she is pregnant, the frog will respond to the presence of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) in her urine by laying its own eggs within the next 24 hours. We invite you to follow a live-streaming video of Loretta as she sits in a tank in Brooklyn. You’ll see the white amphibian with distinctive little black claws doing very little. (That doesn’t mean the link is broken; it just turns out that the frog doesn’t do much.) If you see anything odd in the tank, please feel free to comment on the blog—or better yet, call us! We thought this would be a more interesting, communal, and differently synchronous way to think through animal labor, reproductive history, gender norms, and the many other different constellations of kinship, human and animal alike, that get formed in the process of reproducing. And it was a lot more stimulating and interactive than dropping ten bucks at our local drug store for a home pregnancy test.

With anticipation,

X & Y

The e-mail excerpted above initiated the transformation of a private query into a participatory public spectacle. The eighteenth-century experimental demonstrations of London’s Royal Society—where, for example, birds expired within the vacuum of a glass jar—also involved staging spectacles for a live human audience.28 If these earlier experiments were performed for a restricted public of “modest witnesses,” white adult males of the upper class, our own enactment of the Xenopus pregnancy test was open to the more democratic and unruly public space of the Internet.29 While a restricted public gathered to witness the injection of Loretta, the public webcast circulated among an extended network—which included some of our colleagues and children, their friends, and friends of friends—some 130 people according to Ustream’s viewer statistics. Our performance brought the typically private matter of conception to an experimental arena where approaches to witnessing competed with social norms for engaging with art, colleagues, roommates, friends, and strangers.

DD: Interestingly when I read this I thought: I remember bringing up the issue of the isolating sticks of paper and plastic and if there were other methods of testing for pregnancy which were more open or performative - at a synbio workshop. These stupid kids dismissed it as something "only sluts" would be interested in, which shocked me, since reproductive health is something people should take charge of. I was so turned off by their closemindedness and lack of foresight on the importance of the knowledge of pregnancy and how this affected lots of women - to the point that I didn't really want to work in their teams anymore.

The Object as Reality Check

What can be gleaned from material culture, then, that current political discourse fails to register? Fundamentally, Adamson argues, the objects have an indisputable material presence which renders them useful touchstones in a debate that is generally conducted in the immaterial realms of social media, fake news, and instantaneous opining. “Material objects are facts in the world,” says Adamson. “We’re living in this giant distortion field, and the tendency to interact with one another immaterially through online platforms has made the distortion much more powerful and pervasive. It strikes me that the material realm is a series of hard facts and the digital realm is a world of spin, fiction, claims, and counterclaims – but also of creativity.” Below, Adamson discusses four objects or object types examined in the Objects of Dispute seminar. “These material artefacts have a factual basis and if we do justice to them, it helps give us an armature for challenging this post-truth situation,” he says. “Although it’s a terrifying situation that we’re in, it’s not unprecedented. It’s an important moment for historians to say: OK, there’s a pattern here. It has particular qualities now because of digital information economies, but you can also see a lot of resemblances. If we don’t want to go down the road of fascism, we need to engage in some pattern recognition and judge our counteractions accordingly. It’s a matter of being thoughtful and analytical as well as emotional.”

Consumption & Obsolescence

The Gift of Death By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012:

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).

But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.

...

This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5). An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you.

DD: making a design business - so much of it is useless tat. is art useless? of course, it is amazing to be able to make something that could not exist under any other circumstance. i think i couldn't work on something if it was just "nice to have". this is the problem of why i dont want to work in advertising. i dont want to sell something. i want it to be functional. like on my table, which are the truly functional things? this white pepper (i eat it and it gives my food flavour), the rennies (it is purely for curing an acidic stomach and it works), this hard drive. but there is also a lot of useless things. decorative designy things.


informatic density - a style i want to achieve

johnhathway - https://www.ana-cooljapan.com/contents/dreams/movie/headphone/INT13071013

Executed by free-lance, united multipronged creation activity and commercial operation on the picture,the design, the technology, the theory, the design of the science course like a novel, product design, a corporate design, an equipment development, a robotic development, a software development, animation, 3D solid illustration, and a corporate technological consultant and the corporate logo design, etc. , and the story, etc.

informatic density

They usually foreground a loli girl on a broomstick, but their backgrounds multiply the peripheral optics of shōtengai in two dimensions: storefronts recede both vertically and horizontally, with fish-eye distortions reiterating multilevel regress and implying multiple points of view in a single frame.

These images have deservedly received praise for their informatic density—recently appearing on the cover of a book called Visual Culture “Super” Lectures, by the critic Ishioka Yoshiharu—but at their core they’re really just a more organized, gridded representation of the multiscale image market actually going on in Akihabara (and elsewhere) every day. Again, there’s eroticism here; but again, something about the volume of proliferation seems to stretch this aesthetic beyond the sexual until it becomes (cringe-worthily) funny. Sean Cubitt: “endlessly proliferating difference is as noisy as endless symmetry.”

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CB2EBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=Sean+Cubitt:+%E2%80%9Cendlessly+proliferating+difference+is+as+noisy+as+endless+symmetry.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=6O56V8OdKC&sig=erhdfrJs8NqL-NKSeIesyEWj1nQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiC9_XGycbRAhVIBsAKHbxyACcQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=Sean%20Cubitt%3A%20%E2%80%9Cendlessly%20proliferating%20difference%20is%20as%20noisy%20as%20endless%20symmetry.%E2%80%9D&f=false

It’s about the world we live in and the world we want to create.

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